Hi all, I recently put LMDE2 on a new machine - an HP Compaq Presario CQ42. Everything pretty much works great except for one thing: the camera. I first noticed it when trying to do a video call with Google Hangouts. Skype doesn't recognize it. I even tried Cheese, and it says no device found. It's the same when I try the site http://testwebcam.com/. Flash tells me there's no camera found.

I recently learned about /proc and the whole idea of everything is a file on Linux. Which means that while I'm not a newbie to Linux, I'm still more or less in the beginner stage when it comes to dealing with hardware issues in a distro. So does anyone have suggestions for how I can figure out the problem? Thanks all.

I did a bit of research on the webcam of the Presario. It should have a USB interface. Therefore, lsusb should find it, provided it is switched on. As richyrich suggested, please check your manual for that laptop if there is either a switch or key combination to switch the camera on/off or if there is a BIOS setting for enabling/disabling the camera. There might however be a chance that the webcam hardware is a very striped down version which requires the proper driver (mostly Windows) to function at all. The modem board in my HP notebook is such a stripped down example. It will not work with any other OS than Windows.